Tebe lets out a throaty laugh. ‘I had a friend went to London. He got mugged. I said, “Man, you live in Jo’burg and you have to go to London to get mugged these days?’’’ After years as a tourism pariah, my Soweto-born guide tells me that Johannesburg has changed. Less than a decade ago, the centre was a no-go area. Now galleries and museums are filling the once run-down streets, the Art Deco buildings are being restored and a rapid rail system, the Gautrain, is being built in readiness for the 2010 World Cup. Jo’burg may lack Cape Town’s stunning setting, but as Africa’s main air-traffic hub, simply to fly in and straight out again means bypassing an energetic and edgy city.
I’m staying in Jo’burg en route to Botswana’s remote Okavango Delta. Orient-Express, famous for its luxury trains, own equally luxurious hotels and safari camps around the world, including three safari camps in the delta. Their hotel in a leafy suburb of Jo’burg, the Westcliff – a cluster of terracotta-coloured villas set on a hillside – is an oasis away from the city’s frenetic buzz. South Africa’s largest and richest city began as a gold rush town in 1865. The discovery of gold led to an influx of African workers and the establishment of racially segregated townships to house them. We take a tour of Soweto – an abbreviation of South Western Townships – and it’s a revelation. I’d imagined a Tsotsi-style shanty town. While the shacks are still there, we also find a thriving city, with distinct suburbs, shopping malls and a penchant for BMWs.
On Vilakazi Street, we visit the modest, former home of Nelson Mandela – who celebrates his 90th birthday this month – where he lived until his imprisonment in 1962. Down the road is Soweto’s first museum, dedicated to Hector Pieterson. Thirteen-year-old Hector was one of the early fatalities when police fired on a peaceful student demonstration on 16 June 1976. The Soweto uprising sparked international outrage and signalled the beginning of the end of apartheid in South Africa.
One of the most symbolic changes is the transformation of Constitution Hill. The site of the notorious Number Four prison, where both Mandela and Ghandi served time, is now a museum. Tebe tells me that when two of the prison towers were demolished, the bricks were saved and used to build the new Constitutional Court of South Africa.
That evening, the cosmopolitan suburb of Melville proves an antidote to the harsh realities of the past. A stroll along 7th Street, with its boutiques and café culture, is testament to the city’s ongoing regeneration and we join the throng of Jo’burgers spilling out of the bars and onto the pavements.
But if Jo’burg is a city built on gold, Botswana is a country built on diamonds. A British protectorate – Bechuanaland, as it was then – until 1966, its timely discovery of diamonds in 1967 transformed it from a poor country to one of the most prosperous and stable in Africa. Botswana is also famous for its starring role in Alexander McCall Smith’s novels about The No 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, which centre round the country’s first female private detective Mma Precious Ramotswe.
We fly into Maun, the steamy, sprawling hub of northern Botswana and gateway to the delta, then take a short Cessna flight north to Chobe National Park. Botswana is a dry place, a land of desert and scrub bush. As we fly over endless savannah, a solitary road cuts through it, stretching to the horizon. With a population of less than two million, the pristine wilderness of the north has been given over to national parks and vast private game reserves, allowing wildlife to roam freely. As one veteran safari-goer tells me, Africa’s last great wilderness offers the crème de la crème of game viewing, along with some of the finest bush accommodation.
